Scott's Column iPad Games and Apps... and Scott's Paranoia
About Backups

September 2, 2012
By Scott Lewis

This past month has been a slow one... at least for tech items for
this column. I did go thorough my backup strategy when reading about a
writer for Wired that lost his data to hackers. I also provide a quick
update on the iPad games and apps I use most often.

Two apps take up almost all my time with the iPad. Flipboard
and Zynga Poker. It is terrible. This iPad is a total
time suck. I find it hard to sit and watch TV without picking it up and
playing poker. I usually use Flipboard in the morning before going to
work. Again... I can't even watch the local news without also flipping
through headlines on the iPad.

Who came up with this crazy thing. I am addicted. What can I do?

OK. So I also use the iPad to watch videos with AV Player HD and to hold
photos.

I am off to New York for a short trip in September. I will report back
how well the iPad does on battery life and trying to find Free WiFi when
away from home.

I finally found a good offline poker game for the iPad. It is called
Poker: Hold'em Championship HD and it is by Glu. This is the same
game as the original WSOP Hold'em game I had for my iPod and Android
phone. It is not branded WSOP anymore, and this time it is free. I feel
bad about that because it is so good I have no trouble pay for it. There
is a non-HD version for the iPhone as well. Highly recommended.

I took this as a tiny wake up call. I am not as guilty as Mat in the
protection of my data, but his tale caused me to double check that I was
doing the right thing... especially since I have not made any changes to
my backup strategy since getting an iPad. Granted, having an iPad is no
reason to worry about backups. After all, the data on my iPad comes
from my PC when it is synced.

I was mainly concerned because I established a folder on my main PC to
hold photos and sync those photos to my iPad. These are copies of some
of my own photos... as well as pictures I have downloaded from the
Internet. For the most part these files are not important. The photos I
took I have the originals that are already being backed up. However, to
prevent having duplicates all over my computer I moved all photos I
downloaded from the internet to the folder I sync with my iPad. I did
need to insure this folder was included in my backup plan.

Another iPad related item... I imported all my music from my Zune to
iTunes. With this comes the chore of rating all my music...
again. Zune
and iTunes save their ratings differently in the meta data of the MP3
files. This meant I had to re-rate all my songs. I would do it anyway
because iTunes has 1-5 stars, which means 6 ratings if you count no
rating as having meaning. Zune only has 2 ratings, Love It or Hate It.
So they have 3 if you also count not rated.

Bottom line is this... I took this time to make sure I was backing up
everything important. If Mat Honan could lose his data maybe I could.

And I have.

Yes... I said it... I lost a lot of data a few months ago. I was moving
a piece of furniture. I had two external hard drives on this furniture.
I went to move the drives gently to a near by shelf. But the dummy that I
am... I did not power down those drives before moving them. I
accidentally bumped one of the drives. It is dead now. There was a lot
of information on that drive. So I have saved it. I may pay to have the
data recovered from a service some day.

I lost all my installs. This is minor, but it included the license key
for my copy of Photoshop. I should still have that in an email, so I
just need to look for it.

The irreplaceable stuff I lost was all the digital photos I had from the
first two digital cameras we owned. There was about 8 years of photos.
All the photos of my kids growing up. Eventually I will try to get that
data retrieved.

I did not think about that drive previously. It was a low priority
drive. Those were really old photos, and I have been backing up all the
photos I take with my current camera. In fact, that drive I lost
was the backup drive. It held copies of my current photo folder. The problem
really came down to this... when I built my current PC two years ago...
I didn't bother to bring back those really old photos. I just left them
on the backup drive. Oops!

I bought a new external drive... and created the following backup
strategy:

My PC is backed up with a command file (batch file) to a folder on
the internal drive of my server.

My server's internal drive is backed up to an external drive attached
to the server.

Critical files from the server are backed up to a second external
hard drive.

If you follow that... then you know my PC is backed up twice... both
to an internal and external drive on the server. With the critical files
from the server itself backed up to both external hard drives.
That
means I have three copies of all my important files.

I typically run these backups once in a while. But after reading about
Mat Honan, I decided to take it to the next level. Time to double check
that my iTunes data is backed up, and time to schedule the backups to
run regularly.

I do not leave my PC on all the time. I used to, but find it a little
annoying since it is in my bedroom. And I find it a waste of
electricity. Not that I am a green, save the planet kind of person.
Quite the opposite. I have no trouble heating up my oven to warm a
single slice of pizza or some garlic toast. But leaving the PC running
all night and all day when I am at work... Why? I would do it if it was
doing something worthwhile. But what would it do except fetch emails?

However, I do tend to leave the computer running all weekend long. So...
I set the backup of my PC to happen at 4:00 AM every Sunday. I then set
my server to backup every Monday at 9:00 AM. My server is on all the
time... but I just assume it does its backups while I am at work. After
all, it is in my bedroom too.